Leader of the Block Party

By Karen Tumulty/Washington

(TIME, March 25) -- As the presidential-campaign battleground shifts to Washington, Tom Daschle seems an odd candidate for the role he is about to
play as President Clinton's first line of defense on Capitol
Hill. A slight and boyish-looking man of 48, he had never
managed a major bill before becoming Senate Democratic leader
last year. Almost incapable of eye-to-eye engagement with the
television camera, he prefers to read his speeches, softly and
deliberately, from behind a pair of glasses. "He looks like a
choirboy," sighs veteran South Carolina Democrat Fritz Hollings,
a fire breather.

But to the surprise of his allies and his foes, the South Dakota
Democrat has proved remarkably skillful at marshaling his
outnumbered Senate forces into an almost insurmountable obstacle
to the G.O.P. agenda. One by one, they have buried almost every
item in the Contract with America. And where the G.O.P. has
managed to get critical bills passed in the Senate--on welfare
reform, for instance--the Democrats have generally reshaped them,
sanding off enough of the ideological edges to sour the victory
for many Republicans.

In his early, often rocky months as minority leader, Daschle's
most delicate task was to distance Senate Democrats from Clinton
and what the Senator's own advisers called an "aura of failure
surrounding the Democratic Party." Now he faces an almost
opposite challenge. "I have to be certain that the Senate floor
doesn't become the presidential-campaign megaphone for Bob Dole,
and to a certain extent, we can do that by keeping the
Republican majority in check," Daschle says. "I also have to be
sure that any legislation out of the Senate has as much a
Democratic stamp as a Republican one, so the President can claim
as much credit as Bob Dole."

So far it seems to be working. Last week, under pressure from
Daschle's troops, Senate Republicans dismayed their counterparts
in the House when they added $2.7 billion for education demanded
by Clinton to a spending bill that would keep the government
operating for the rest of the year. In scoring these victories,
Daschle has a time-honored weapon at his disposal, one that Dole
put to good use in the past--the filibuster. With enough party
discipline, it makes the minority leader unstoppable. Whereas
House Democrats have regularly fractured, Senate Democrats have
yet to lose the seven defectors it would take to break a
Daschle-backed filibuster.

When Daschle was elected to the job by a one-vote margin 15
months ago, virtually every Senate Democrat of stature lined up
against him. The barons who lost their chairmanships in the wake
of the 1994 Democratic rout quietly recruited Connecticut's
Chris Dodd to run against him, arguing that someone with
Daschle's inexperience would be no match for Gingrich's
gale-force approach to legislating or Dole's awesome mastery of
the game.

But amid the towering egos of the Senate, what works for Daschle
is something entirely different: he has inexhaustible patience
for finding a consensus. "He gets everybody; he doesn't lose
anybody," says West Virginia's Jay Rockefeller. "That's easier
when you're in the minority, but for Democrats, it's never
easy." Daschle's colleagues still question whether the quiet
tenacity that has served him so well as an obstructionist will
become a liability if the Democrats regain control of the Senate
and are once again called upon to set the agenda, rather than
thwart it. For now, though, even the Republicans acknowledge
Daschle's effectiveness, at least in a backhanded way. "They
made us jump a lot of hoops," says Dole. But then Dole knows
better than anyone else the value of that tactic. "That's part
of leadership," he adds.